As a homage to the way Chris Tarrant teasingly reveals the answers to the big money questions on Who Wants To Be a MIllionaire?, let’s all sit here and wait an agonisingly long 30 seconds before continuing to read the next line.

Still there? Okay, good. Because as long-running as ITV’s cash cow quiz show might be, however, viewers of a certain age will better remember the wise-cracking flaxen-haired presenter from the heady days of their youth. Indeed, there’s an entire generation who’ll recall him best from TISWAS, which ran from 1974-1982 and was, to all intents and purposes, the punk rock of kids’ weekend telly.

An acronym for Today Is Saturday Watch And Smile, it was a show which, to many impressionable young minds, felt like genuine anarchy was unfolding in their living rooms.Even watching clips of it now, it still feels dangerous in a way no children’s programme has before or since.

A health and safety executive’s nightmare vomited forth in glorious technicolour, it was one of broadcasting history’s moments of glorious, unscripted abandon – Tarrant, Lenny Henry and Sally ‘something for the dads’ James all chasing excitable tykes around a studio floor perilously slick with custard pie detritus and littered with camera cables.

How no one got seriously hurt is anybody’s guess – although the show’s late night ‘adult’ version, O.T.T. would prove a bridge too far – its fate sealed early on when late comedian Malcolm Hardee did a naked balloon dance at the end of the very first episode.

Although, compared to Tarrants’ stint hosting Man O Man – the late ‘90s ITV dating show which made Blind Date look like the Mensa entrance exam - it was a work of sublime comic genius.

The recipient of an OBE, a Lifetime Acheivement comedy award and named one of the Most Annoying People of the Year by BBC Three in 2007, Tarrant’s always divided his audience. As mixed bags go though, his largely remains full of laughs.